The people at Midlands Community Development Corporation want to revamp their site into a webapp with a bunch of new features. They are looking for someone to do this. If you are interested call Edward Mines at 803-361-8028.

Kimberly is unable to do the demos so I will be reviewing them tomorrow (Friday) or Monday afternoon. Please email me to set up a time.

Hi everyone! For your final project, everyone is going to do short presentations on Monday. I will come to class to watch these. However, I'm obviously not going to learn everything I need in five minutes in order to grade your projects. So, we're going to do demos again. However, these demos will be longer and more detailed than before. You will need to be able to explain in detail exactly what you did. So, they will probably take 20+ minutes each. I think it will probably be easier to just set up individual demo times since it will be during exam week and I don't know what everyone's schedule is like. I have an exam on Saturday (May 5th) and Tuesday (May 8th) morning, but other than that I should be available. So, please figure out as soon as possible when you would like to do your demo and e-mail me to set up a time. The latest you should consider is Tuesday May 8th or Wednesday May 9th because I need to get grades in for Dr. Vidal so he can submit your grades. I'll look to hear from you. Thanks!

In case you were wondering, below is a graph of the grade distributions for the first three problem sets (google spreadsheets just added charts).

Each team will be required to give a short (5 minutes) demo of their final project in class on April 30. It is just an informal demo to show me, and your classmates, what you have done.

One of the founders of the Internet, and current VP of Google, Vint Cerf will be visiting us on April 24. There is a VIP lunch with him at noon and they are asking if any of you want to go. Email me if you want to be one of the chosen few. Did I also mention, free lunch?

If you are thinking of graduate school, go visit our office of fellowships to learn how to apply to various fellowships. There are plenty and they offer real money. The NSF fellowship, for example, will pay all of your tuition at any school you want and give you a salary of $25K/year, just for going to school. Every year several of our students get these, as well as other fellowships. This is your year.

In case you are confused, the PS3 demos will be at the same time and place as in the previous message (see below) from Kimberly.

By popular demand, here is the PS3 grading rubric which will be used to grade you problem set. Note that we will also take points off for things that obviously should be in your solution, even if they are not in the rubric. Like, does it actually display news items?

Here is a short video of Tim Berners-Lee talking about the semantic web and its possible applications. Some of his examples could be good final projects!

Notice how the background music at the beginning makes him sound so much smarter. I'm definetly getting background music when I do my video.

Just some quick ideas:

• I know you use facebook. Did you know about the facebook API? Who's more macho in Facebook?
• If you are looking for an database that is also a backend, how about Google Base. Check out their API.
• Speaking of google, all their services: notebook, picasa web albums, maps, gmail, etc. have an API.

Oh and, yes, as I mentioned in class last week you can turn in PS3 on Monday.

For PS3 we will again need to set up demos. Here is Kimberly's message with the details:

“ Hi everyone! Since PS3 is another client-server architecture, we're going to do demos again. So, your PS3 is due on Wednesday, March 28 at 2:30. I will be available in lab 1D29 after your class at 3:45 until 7:00 to watch your demos. I remember that some of you have another class after 590 that will last until 5:15. If this is the case, you can just wait and come after you get out of your other class. If this time does not suit you, please let me know ahead of time so we can schedule another time to meet to do your demo. I will have my laptop with me again in case you need to use it. See you Wednesday! ”

It was a hard decision as there were many good contendenders but we did manage to pick a few of the PS2 solutions which we thought were good. They are, in alphabetical order:

• Jason Dew
• John Flowers
• Mark Larue
• Alex Varghese

It is interesting to see the different approaches to handling the large volume of classes that we had to handle. Which one do you think is most user-friendly? which one would you use? Also, it might not be too obvious at first but most of these implement drag-and-drop functionality.

I just found out that you haven't gotten back your PS1 grades. This was due to a miscommunication between Kimberly and myself. Sorry. I will be bringing in the grades to class on Wednesday.

You can check the schedule to see when you will need to give your talk. Also note that if any undergraduate student wants to give a similar talk, for extra credit, I am sure we can work something out. Anyway, it looks like an exciting and varied set of topics. I am sure I, at least, will learn a lot!

The grades for PS2 have been emailed to you. If you have not received your grade it is probably because Kimberly does not have your email. Send her an email (see earlier post for her address) if you want to get your grade. The grading rubric used is:

1. 30pts. User Friendly Design of Classes for the top part of the screen. User has access to various departments and classes (sections). Checkbox beside each class section.
2. 30pts. Design of graphical schedule at bottom of screen. When a class section is checked, it should appear in the correct spot on the graphical schedule. Shows the class as well as the building number.
3. 15ptsIf two classes that the user has selected overlap, then this should be apparent to the user. User should be able to pick as many classes as he wants.
4. 15ptsPrint button that when clicked will show the user the list of classes he has selected for his schedule, as well as the weekly graphical schedule for those classes.
5. 10ptsUse of Cascading Style Sheet/Schedule Re-Sizes Properly as Size of Browser Window Changes/Other

The following is a new video from the YUI theather (by the way, no one offered to present the Yahoo UI library, what a shame) by Gopal Venkatesan on writing efficient JavaScript:

If you failed to put a comment in your file indicating who worked on that file, please email Kimberly your names and the username under which you submitted the files.

As you know, the graduate students in the class have to give a 30 minute presentation on the topic of their choice, as long as it is about web applications. I am specifically looking for you to cover some of the javascript libraries and web development platforms available. The talk should tell us what the software does and how to use it. You can find suitable topics by looking at my list or reading posts in the ajaxian blog. The talks start in March 26. There will be two per class. I will the day assignments randomly. You must email me your choice of topic by March 9. I will let you know if its acceptable. Also note that I will be discussing rico and scriptaculous.

Sturgis Web Services is a small company started by a USC CSE graduate, Andy Castillo. They are looking to hire someone who can help with web application development and tech support.

Apparently the previous JSON file has some errors and cannot be read by IE (but it works fine in Firefox). If you are using IE, or some other browser that complains about the data format, you might want to use this data file, thanks to Mark La Rue.

Here is a short talk by Brendan Eich, who created JavaScript while at Netscape and then founded Mozilla.org. Check it out, he shows Doom running on JavaScript+Canvas!

You can find more similar videos here

Thanks to Jason Dew we now have a perl script which will turn the CSV version of the spreadsheet into JSON. Feelfree to use these and modify as you see fit. Also, if you happen to have written a similar script but in, say, Python, feel free to send it to me.

If you are planning to turn in PS 1 remember that you need to email Kimberly (see earlier not) to schedule your demo.

If you want to watch some JavaScript lectures from someone who knows a lot more about it than I do then go to the Yahoo UI Theater and stream the lectures by Douglas Crockford, Yahoo JavaScript architect, on The JavaScript Programming Language and Advanced JavaScript. His slides are also available. I really liked these lectures and I borrowed some of his examples when working on my slides.

If you are having trouble getting PS1 done in time note that you can turn it in up to a week late with a 10% penalty in your grade. I will not be granting any extensions after that.

Also PS 2 is posted. While we have yet to cover the JavaScript you will need to get started on the programming side of it, you should be able to get started building the HTML/CSS needed to display the schedules. Note that it will need some some fancy div placement in the page.

If you get the error

Referenced file contains errors (http://www.ibm.com/webservices/xsd/j2ee_web_services_client_1_1.xsd)

open your web.xml file and change

web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4" 
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee 
         http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"

to

web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4" 
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee.xsd 
         http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"

That is, add the .xsd after the j2ee. This fixed the problem for one person in class. Although, I note that neither of the two URLs point to an .xsd file. Hmmmm...

The following is a message from our TA, Kimberly Jonce:

“ Your PS1 is due on Monday, February 12th at 2:30. I will be available after your class to watch demos of your program. I will be in lab 1D29 from 3:45 when you get out of class until 6:00. If you have a conflict with this time, feel free to e-mail me at yoncek at engr.sc.edu in order to set up another meeting time. I have class from 12:30-1:45 on Tuesday, but will be available any other time to meet you to see your demo. However, if you can't meet on Monday, please e-mail me ahead of time and let me know so we can set up a time for Tuesday. It would be helpful if you have a laptop with your program set up on it to bring it in order to do your demo. If not, I'll have my laptop with me. See you next week! ”

A student writes:

“I am having trouble with eclipse finding javax.servlet. to import. did i miss putting in a path somewhere? I have Tomcat up and running fine by its websites tests.”

You need to add these libraries to the build path (sometimes Eclipse does this automatically when you create the we application).
To add the libraries to the build path do:

1. Right click on the project and select properties.
2. Click on "Java build path".
3. Click on the "libraries" tab.
4. Click on "Add external Jars" and add "C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat5.5\common\lib\servlet-api.jar". Repeat for any other libraries you might need. For simple projects you just need servlet-api.jar. In the future, you might want to create a user library which contains everything in that lib directory.

Would you be interested in participating in the 2007 IEEE International Services Computing Contest (SCContest 2007)? If so, let me know.

Here is Guess.java. In the version of the trick with two people you can use a more sophisticated codeword such as 'anything black' or 'something drinkable'.

If you don't like to keep checking this website for news and refuse to use an RSS aggregator there is still a way that you can easily stay informed. You can use that great 20th century technology known as email. Just go to www.rssfwd.com and type in http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/webapps/news.rss and then give them your email address. They will forward you any new news posted here. Also, remember that your cellphone almost certainly has an email-to-text gateway, so you can use your cellphone's email to get a text message with any new updates and thus never escape the fun that is web applications.

On ajaxian, I came across this video of firebug in action by Joe Hewitt, on of the authors. It is a bit hard to see what he is doing. This video will make more sense to you after we do Javascript.

I found this interesting analysis of where people spend their time on the interweb. I guess myspace's showing is not surprising given their high-school target audience. But, what's the deal with Bank of America?

Of course, we haven't yet covered Java Servlets but at least you can start working on your XHTML. Here is PS1.

As you know, the first problem set will require you to write a Java servlet program. This means that you will need to have Java and a Servlet engine (namely, Tomcat) installed in your development machine. Since most of you are already familiar with Eclipse, the easiest way get everything set up and running is to install Eclipse, the Eclipse Wep Tools plugin, and Tomcat. The following are step by step instructions on how to do this (from Kimberly Yonce, our TA):

1. Download Eclipse with Web Tools Platform (WTP) plugin. Download WTP 1.5.2 from the following website: http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/releases/1.5.2/. You can download the Web Tools Platform: All-In-One for your particular platform (Windows, Linux, or Mac). This will include all of the prerequisites needed.
2. You will also need to have a Java Development Kit (JDK). The latest version, JDK 6, can be downloaded from the following website: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
3. You will also need to install Tomcat Server 5.5. This can be accomplished by following the steps at: http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/Preconfigured-Tomcat-Version.html If you choose to install it this way, you are downloading a preconfigured version. There is one configuration you will need to change back in order for it to work with Eclipse. They changed the port from 8080 to 80. You will need to change this back by editing the following line in install_dir/conf/server.xml:
   
   Connector port = "80" .... Change the 80 to 8080.
   
4. You can also choose to download the Tomcat Server from the following site: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi#5.5.20

If all this seems complicated, start now! I will be posting problem set 1 really soon.

The rumors that Google is placing data centers in the Carolinas are solidifying. Cringley says that they need all these data centers to feed video and replace cable TV. Maybe, although Time-Warner Cable already allows me to pay-per-view from a large number of movies, but they don't offer "user content". I expect to see a lot of innovation in the areas of video delivery. I also think the Google guys just have a ton of cash lying around and realize that the network is the computer and that web applications will be huge and they will thus all need some major server power to run them. So, they spend the cash in laying out the infrastructure which will be needed to run all this stuff, even if they don't know which particular web apps will win in the end.

Check out this short article by Eric Schmidt (CEO of google, and, you will remember, geeky guy from SUN with car in office) on why You should not bet against the Internet. The article is from the Economist's "The World in 2007" which also has a short article on the Web2.0 (digg, del.icio.us, last.fm, and alibaba) and on how Internet will make TV obsolete in the same way its making record stores obsolete.

We won't be covering Ajax till later in the semester but you should start keeping up to date on what's happening. I have found Ajaxian to be the best blog for all things Ajax. If you find other good blogs that seem related to this class please let me know. On the fun side, Valleywag is like a tech industry People magazine—gossip about people that actually matter!

I have posted the first lecture in the class schedule and added some historically relevant, and now unintentionally funny but still interesting, videos.

• The New Internet - A TV news shows from the 1980's on this newfangled thing called the Internet.
• Hyperland by Douglas Adams - A description of hypertext from before the Web had been invented.

We are up and running.